ALL BAR NONE

By Oliver Webb

AQueer fantasy-retelling of Boston’s oldest gay bar, Playland Café, Playland is a stylistically ethereal and moving piece from director Georden West. Hauntingly captured in bold and vibrant hues by DP Jo Jo Lam, Playland pays tribute to times past.

“I first met Georden West online,” says Lam. “It was on Zoom during the very first few months of the pandemic. They found my work on this platform called ‘Free The Work’, a discovery platform for underrepresented filmmakers. Georden wrote me this quite elaborate email about what Playland would be about and included an incredible reference/ research book that was around 20-pages long in that email. Once I received that I thought we have to have a chat.”

West and Lam prepped via Zoom for around six months, before meeting in person.

“It was advantageous because we had a lot of time to send references back-and-forth,” says Lam. “ When Georden first sent me the script, they had originally wanted to shoot it in one shot – which I was equally terrified and excited about. The concept behind it was a forever floating camera, haunting the different spaces in Playland Café. Once we were able to meet in-person, we jumped straight into shot-listing and talked endlessly about the visual approach, grammar and edit. We also stuck to the approach of shooting in very wide tableaux-like shots, where all our characters slid back-and-forth between different time and spaces.

In terms of references, Lam and West discussed Jenny Livingston’s 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning “Queer / LGBTQ bar and club spaces are historically under-documented and represented, and Paris Is Burning was something we talked about right at the beginning,” notes Lam. “We also spoke about movies by directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Roy Andersson and Tarkovsky, and Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together (1997, DP

Christopher Doyle). Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant (1972, DP Michael Ballhaus ASC) was another one.

“Shooting 4:3 is quite a specific choice in terms of how you depict interactions and conversations, and how you block is so completely different too, and I thought The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant was so helpful to watch, as the characters are mostly in one bedroom, smoking and talking. How they made that feel very dynamic, was very helpful. The work of Robbie Müller was also another big influence. I don’t think we spoke about The American Friend (1997, Dir. Wim Wenders, DP Robbie Müller) in relation to this film, but I definitely took the spirit of these bars and shot them with sickly fluorescent green.”

When it came to their initial conversations about the look of Playland, Lam notes that the film has a very precise colour palette, costumes and make-up.

“ We had weekly meetings about colour and stuff would play into it, but they mostly revolved around how we would create this ethereal world, that is a little bit of a haunted space that never quite dies. We spoke about books, music and paintings. Georden mentioned Irving Penn’s photographs from Vogue magazines, in terms of this very muted colour palette, all in grotesque greens and pinks and how can we marry those things together.” design with respective department heads. We mostly had conversations about blocking and where to place the camera because of how wide most of our shots are. Once we figured that out, we could have a more creative conversation about lighting and how the world would feel,” explains Lam.

Lam and West entertained the idea of shooting on film, though ultimately landed on the ARRI Alexa Mini LF, with BeCine providing the camera equipment.

“There were also discussions about the history of Playland Café, as it was a real bar and some archive

“One of the things I thought early-on was to have a camera and lenses testing day with the director and cast member, Aidan Dick. If you can do this at your location that’s best, but considering this was a low-budget production, at least we could bring a couple of these elements into the camera house and test how they mesh together,” details Lam.

Lam and West opted for Canon FDs lenses from the 1970s, with Old Fast Glass providing the lenses.

“The great thing about the Canon FDs is that they have creamy, slightly cool, skin tone rendering and they are full frame. Some distortions, but not too much. We were ultimately looking for lenses that had some textures and characteristics without too much distortion. We tested 16mm with sharper lenses because 16mm tends to be soft with more grain. Then we tested regular ARRI Alexa Mini with vintage lenses and then the Alexa Mini LF, also with vintage lenses, but shaper ones. Once Georden saw what the 16mm looked like, they thought it would be too definitive on the time period, almost like putting nostalgia on nostalgia, and I felt the same way.”

Lam operated on the film, alongside Steadicam operator Dae Hyun Kim and 1st AC Adam Lee. Discussing the sequence with the kitchen door swinging back-and-forth and revealing a new scene each time, Lam remembers being struck by its simplicity.

“We had conversations about making those spaces as timeless as possible,” says Lam. “The reason why the director wanted to do it in one shot is to feel like this never-ending dream/nightmare, where the space is there and its completely decrepit and doesn’t exist anymore, but the characters, who are these workers, are stuck there forever. I felt that scene was a very simple and elegant way to portray that, of how these dimensions and characters come together. We did it very simply. It was a stationary camera and then we did old-school practical effects, film look. Ultimately, I went with the standard one and I lit to that. In the post pipeline we just watched that the entire time throughout the edit. By the time we actually went into the DI, even though we still broke everything down, it was a good base point of knowing where everything was.” essentially having someone pulling the door from behind and then switching out the characters and costumes. That was a very simple and efficient way to get something like that across.

The production schedule was extremely tight, with only eight shooting days. James Arterberry served as key and dolly grip on the film and Lam also asked gaffer, Dave Wilwayco to hop on board the project.

“Dave and I have worked together in the past and have a good rapport,” says Lam. “ The director is also a perfectionist and we didn’t have much time to get it wrong. We quickly determined that rigging everything on DMX was going to be very helpful, because it would give us control over changing looks and cues, with the very helpful board operator, Kai Magee.

“The film doesn’t really have coverage, so it’s really about how can we sustain one shot for as long as possible and have the blocking and lighting and everything to tell the story. Since everything was going to be built on a sound stage, I chatted with the production designer about the space and dimensionality. I had the feeling that large format would help us with making the bar feel a little bit bigger. We shot in New England Studios in Boston. They had very little time to build the set, only around one to two weeks. The set that we built was quite big. We were lucky that the studio had large Tungsten units, like 20ks, which we could also power being on a stage.”

Andrea Chlebak served as colourist on the film and the team used the DI facility at Harbor Picture Company.

“I’d worked with Andrea before on short films and Andrea jumped on this feature with me,” notes Lam. “It would have been great to have had someone help us do daily colouring, but since our budget was so limited that wasn’t an option. I brought in my footage from the camera test and all the references I had with the director and made a LUT beforehand to help us understand where we would take the look in terms of the more muted colour palettes and the insane pink neon that would take over the entire room, while trying to get a film look as much as we could.

“We ended-up with a couple of different LUTs – one that was going to be more creative and expressive, where the shadows would get even bluer, and a standard one that was just a basic 5219

“Since the film spans time periods we decided to break down the script. This was written in the scene headings, although you are not meant to notice them. It’s meant to be reflected in lighting, costume, make-up, or some of the acting, but you aren’t really meant to make a specific time out of it. We knew which period was meant to be the 30s, 40s, or 90s. We broke down this type of map, so when it was an earlier period, we would only use specific lights that would only have existed back then, so more Tungstens, for example. Then from the 80s onwards more colours are introduced, more greens and blues.”

Although time and budgetary constraints proved to be particularly challenging for Lam and the crew, the experience overall was rewarding.

“Georden had very earlyon talked about how they felt like Playland would feel like a ‘sunken ship’ which really stuck with me. I interpreted that as some sort of ghostly presence always haunted this bar. I think the most challenging aspect of the production was going through all those different looks within one space, but it was also extremely freeing as it was ultimately conjuring a mood, time and place.

“I still look at some scenes now and think we could’ve done better given a little more time and personnel. But, ultimately, it was a very rewarding experience. I’m extremely grateful for the collaboration with Georden and to have been pushed out of my comfort zone, where the most interesting work happens. I’m also very thankful to the cast and crew, who went that extra mile, and the camera and lens rental houses, plus Harbor Picture Company, who support independent projects and without whom we wouldn’t have been able to pull this off,” concludes Lam.